Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

If ever there was a sign that democracy in the United States is in dire straits, it was Congress’s rescission of $9 billion in funding for public media, achieved via a party-line vote of 216 to 213 on July 18, 2025. The vote took place despite the fact that millions of people wrote to their elected representatives urging them not to cut funds and that a majority of Americans, including Republicans, support federal funding of public media.

Public funding of media is not the problem that President Donald Trump and his puppet masters at the Heritage Foundation claim it is. Not enough public funding for it is the real problem. According to public media experts Victor Pickard and Timothy Neff, “the U.S. government is notable among democratic nations for how little it funds its public media.”

Compare the public media funding cuts to the $28 billion in tax dollars that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency will receive thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill—a subsidy that goes against public opinion.

A well-resourced media ecosphere is essential to democracy—an informed electorate is far more capable of keeping its representatives accountable than an ignorant one. Fascism thrives on ignorance, and that is precisely what the defunding of public media symbolizes within the context of excessive funding of armed enforcement agents.

Since 1967, congressionally appropriated funds have been distributed to thousands of small broadcast media outlets via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a private nonprofit organization. But CPB funding represents only about 0.01 percent of the federal budget. American media were never very well-resourced—and that was always the problem. For a nation of nearly 350 million people, a few billion dollars of taxpayer funding for........

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